A couple of incidents this weekend drew my attention to the fact that Canada does not have the right to lord it over our violent friends to the South as much as we might like to.
The first was personal. Linda and Josh (the dog) and I spent the weekend at an idyllic retreat. Just 70 or so close friends on 6 acres of manicured grass leading from the converted barn down past the private lake to the ocean. Communally cooked meals, bocce tournament, children’s puppet show, singing around the campfire.
And a nutso neighbor.
I woke up Sunday morning to the sound of Linda calling for Josh. He had sneaked out through a door that we thought was closed and was doing his morning rounds of the campsite unsupervised. Saturday morning he had been in a snarl with the beagle across the way about the beagle’s unfinished breakfast. So I ceded my responsibilities as a pet owner to my wife and rolled over and plugged my ears, hoping for another half-hour’s sleep.
Until I heard the gunshots. Three shots, close together: a sharp, light, sound like a .22 calibre. Fortunately, just then I heard the sound of doggie claws on the patio. Linda and Josh had returned.
Giving up on further sleep, I dressed and headed over to the barn to help with breakfast. I hadn’t gone very far when I heard an argument in the hedge that separates the two properties. A man’s voice, very angry, talking about shooting dogs.
I knew my friend was having problems with this neighbor, and I didn’t want to step in, because it wasn’t any of my business and I didn’t want to make things worse. But the lady who owned the beagle was being polite and apologetic, and the neighbor was getting louder and more bullying. Enough was enough.
I went back and joined the conversation, reminding the man that threatening people with a gun wasn’t the best way to get along. Or words to that effect. His position was that he had to protect his cats, and the next time a dog came onto his property he was going to shoot it.
I suggested politely but firmly that the way to deal with that sort of problem was to call the police or the SPCA.
He said, “That’s not the way we do things in the country.”
I reminded him that the country we were living in was Canada, and that is the way we do things here.
He muttered, gave the dog back to its owner, and retreated to his house.
I went on to the barn, where this whole kafuffle was the topic of choice for breakfast. Our friends from the States were killing themselves laughing. “I thought you guys up here handled your crazies with guns better than that,” was the comment.
To which none of us had a reply.
The second incident was in the news on Friday. It was the end of a long-running saga that went sort of like this:
A couple of years ago, Canada was starting into an election campaign. A right-wing party with a highly unpopular leader was playing the terrorist/security/ law-and-order card in a desperate attempt to drive voters towards its camp. (Sound familiar?) Policing resources were being diverted from Drug and Gang squads and re-allocated to Antiterrorism.
And right in the middle of this, the security services found a couple of newly radicalized, recently converted Muslims who wanted to plant a bomb on the grounds of the Legislature during the BC Day celebrations. The fact that the two were a completely incompetent pair of recovering heroin addicts was a minor detail. For several months the security services coached and supported this pair, feeding them, entertaining them and housing them, training them to make bombs and interpreting the Koran for them. When the two finally planted two dud bombs, they were arrested with great hoopla, and after a long trial, convicted. Yay, law and order!
Then came the second part of the trial. Had they been entrapped? Well, the answer came down with a bang on Friday. According to the judge, there was no doubt. The security services had wasted $900,000 dollars in overtime alone for 240 employees who could have been doing something useful. All this to coach and persuade a pair of incompetents to perform an act they had no chance of achieving on their own. Instead of referring them to the social services they needed, the police further radicalized them. A rather ironic way to prove that they and the government weren’t wasting taxpayers’ dollars on security.
And just a few hours after the pair was released, while they were enjoying a nice lunch at a restaurant with their family, four police cruisers, lights flashing, surrounded them and took them back to court to sign a peace bond.
The cowboys never give up.
Now, nobody denies that these people were a danger. They talked and acted like many of the nutso homegrown terrorists that have done so much damage and killed so many people around the world. It was the complexity of the sting operation and the amount of help this pair were given by the police that tipped the scales.
The Canadian security services have had a nice, expensive (think of the cost of the trial) training exercise, and all they have proved is that this whole “law and order” thing, when taken to extremes, is ridiculous.
So, Canada, we’re not so wonderful after all. We need to get down off our high horses and solve the social problems that create people like this.